Elon Musk Issues Warning: AI Could Kill All of Humanity

The history behind the founding of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, has been revealed. Elon Musk claims that OpenAI was established because he and the other founders were concerned about the threat posed by Google’s AI to humanity.

This story forms part of Musk’s testimony in the lawsuit he filed against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other OpenAI executives. Musk accuses Altman of betraying him by changing OpenAI’s “noble” mission into one focused on profit-seeking. Musk was one of OpenAI’s founders and its initial financier.

“Essentially, I suspect they will make this lawsuit seem very complicated, when it’s actually very simple. Can charity be stolen?” he said.

Musk claims that OpenAI originated from an idea that came to him during a discussion with Google co-founder Larry Page. A company like OpenAI, he continued, needed to exist because Google did not care about safety aspects in AI development.

“I asked [Larry Page], what if AI wipes out humanity? He said it doesn’t matter as long as AI survives. I said that’s crazy. He even called me a ‘species-ist’ for caring more about humans than AI,” he said.

That conversation sparked the idea to establish a rival to Google.

“I provided the idea, the name, recruited key employees, taught them everything I knew, and supplied the initial funding,” said Musk.

Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, also asked Musk to provide his perspective on AI. Musk stated that he suspects AI will be “smarter than humans” as early as next year.

“It could kill us all. We don’t want the outcome to be like Terminator. We want to live in Gene Roddenberry’s world, like Star Trek, not in James Cameron’s film, Terminator,” said Musk.